The Chaplet of Pearls eBook

And for a token, Eustacie looked over her jewels to
find one that would serve for a token; but the only
ones she knew would be recognized, were the brooch
that had fastened the plume in Berenger’s bloody
cap, and the chaplet of pearls. To part with
the first, or to risk the second in the pirate-ship,
was impossible, but Eustacie at last decided upon
detaching the pear-shaped pearl which was nearest
the clasp, and which was so remarkable in form and
tint that there was no doubt of its being well known.

CHAPTER XXI. UNDER THE WALNUT-TREE

Mistress Jean was making the elder-flower wine—­
‘And what brings the Laird at sic a like time?’
LADY
NAIRN, THE LAIRD OF COCKPEN

Summer was nearly ended, and Lucy Thistlewood was
presiding in the great kitchen of the Manor-house,
standing under the latticed window near the large
oak-table, a white apron over her dress, presiding
over the collecting of elder-berries for the brew of
household-wine for the winter. The maids stood
round her with an array of beechen bowls or red and
yellow crocks, while barefooted, bareheaded children
came thronging in with rush or wicker baskets of the
crimson fruit, which the maids poured in sanguine cascades
into their earthenware; and Lucy requited with substantial
slices of bread and cheese, and stout homely garment
mostly of her own sewing.

Lucy was altogether an inmate of her father’s
house. She had not even been at Hurst Walwyn
for many months; for her step-mother’s reiterated
hopes that Berenger would make her his consolation
for all he had suffered from his French spouse rendered
it impossible to her to meet him with sisterly unconsciousness;
and she therefore kept out of the way, and made herself
so useful at home, that Dame Annora only wondered
how it had been possible to spare her so long, and
always wound up her praises by saying, that Berenger
would learn in time how lucky he had been to lose
the French puppet, and win the good English housewife.

If only tidings would have come that the puppet was
safe married. That was the crisis which all the
family desired yet feared for Berenger, since nothing
else they saw would so detach his thoughts from the
past as the leave him free to begin life again.
The relapse brought on by the cruel reply to Osbert’s
message had been very formidable: he was long
insensible or delirious and then came a state of annihilated
thought, then of frightfully sensitive organs, when
light, sound, movement, or scent were alike agony;
and when he slowly revived, it was with such sunken
spirits, that his silence was as much from depression
as from difficulty of speech. His brain was weak,
his limbs feeble, the wound in his mouth never painless;
and all this necessarily added to his listless indifference
and weariness, as though all youthful hope and pleasure
were extinct in him. He had ceased to refer to